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A fortnight ago, Marina Litvinenko was in Germany on a trip with her son when her phone rang. It was a friend calling from the UK.

“Have you heard the news?” they asked.

“What news?” Litvinenko replied, before turning on the television.

That was how she learned of the attempted murder of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The two of them were discovered unconscious by passersby on a bench outside the Zizzi Italian chain restaurant in Salisbury on 4th March.

A subsequent investigation found they had been poisoned by a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union in the Seventies and Eighties, although exactly how they were attacked and by whom is still being investigated....